General Maximal Lifetime Sensor-Target Surveillance Problem and its Solution

Sensor-Target surveillance is one of the promising applications of wireless sensor networks. Typically a sensor-target surveillance network consists of sensor nodes (sensors for short), targets, and a base station in a surveillance region. Sensors are used to monitor the targets and collect and transmit the sensed data to the base station. In many applications, sensors are used to monitor some given targets located at fixed positions (e.g., monitor the temperature of some machines in a factory, monitor the chemical composition around some cargo containers which carry dangerous chemicals in long journey of shipment, etc.).